le, the carnation vividness of the scarlet,
due to all these centuries of tradition. At the same time, an
impression of the utter disconnectedness of it all, the absence of all
spirit or meaning; this magnificence being as the turning out of a great
rag bag of purple and crimson and gold, of superb artistic things all
out of place, useless, patternless, and almost odious: pageantry,
ritual, complicated Palestrina music, crowded Renaissance frescoes,
that huge Last Judgment, that mass of carefully grouped hideous
nudities, brutal, butcher-like, on its harsh blue ground; that ceiling
packed with superb pictures and figures, symmetrical yet at random,
portentous arm and thighs and shoulders hitting one as it were in the
eye. The papal procession, white robes, gold candlesticks, a wizen old
priest swaying, all pale with sea-sickness, above the crowd, above the
halberts and plumes, between the white ostrich fans, and dabbing about
benedictions to the right and left. The shuffle of the people down
onto their knees, and scuffle again onto their feet, the shrill
reading of the Mass, and endless unfinished cadences, overtopped by
unearthly slightly sickening quaverings of the choir; the ceaseless
moving about of all this mass of black backs, veils, cloaks, outlines
of cheek and ear presenting every now and then among the various kinds
of rusty black; no devotion, no gravity, no quiet anywhere, among
these creatures munching chocolates and adjusting opera-glasses.
M.P.'s voice at my ear, now about Longus and Bonghi's paganism, now
about the odiousness of her neighbour who won't let her climb on her
seat, the dreadful grief of not seeing the Cardinal's tails, the
wonderfulness of Christianity having come out of people like the
Apostles (I having turned out Gethsemane in St. Matthew in the Gospel
which she brought, together with a large supply of chocolate and the
Fioretti di S. Francesco), the ugliness of the women, &c. &c. And
meanwhile the fat pink profile perdu, the _toupe_ of grey hair like
powder of a colossal soprano sways to and fro fatuously over the gold
grating above us.

All this vaguely on for a space of time seeming quite indeterminate.
Little by little, however, a change came over things, or my impression
of them. Is it that one's body being well broken, one's mind becomes
more susceptible of homogeneous impressions? I know not. But the
higher light, the incense, fills the space above all those black
women's heads,